Thursday, August 27, 2009

How to let Fans Engage/Write on your Facebook Business Page

An easy way to increase interactivity on your Facebook page is to let your fans easily post to your Wall. The Wall is something that is enabled for both your personal Facebook page (like when friends write on your wall to say "hi" or share something), and the same now holds true for your Facebook Business Page.

Your first instict as a business may be to only allow posts from your business on your wall, to keep it professional. However, your fans (ie customers, supporters, potential customers) may want to publically chime in and let you know that they support you, or have a question that if answered, could apply to other potential customers. In fact, there may be some fans who have written on your Wall right now, but you never noticed!

To check, there is a little link that you very easily could have missed. It's at the top of your page, just below those tabs that say "Wall", "Info", "Photos", and the like. Under that is a text link that is called your business name. Next to it is called "Just Fans". It looks like this:

If you click on "Just Fans," you will see if any of your adoring fans wrote to you in a public way. Now. This public exposure is an incentive for them to write on your wall, which in turn shows up in their News Feeds as an activity that they did, which their friends can see, which then might prompt their friends to come on by and visit your page and see your business. So it may be in your best interest to allow these fan posts to be on the main portion of your Wall. If you did, your main Wall, if you selected that you want fan comments on it, would look like this:

Where you see the little yellow "katie james" squares is my business posting something to my page. Where you see other pictures of people is those people posting things to my page, and everyone else can easily see them. You can see from this picture that some fans of Katie James are asking Facebook questions. This is a great way for me to see them, and answer them back here on the blog.

To enable this to happen, follow these steps:

Click on the "Edit Page" link in the top left of your page, under your logo.

From there, you will use the little picture of the pencil to select which things you want to edit. Click the pencil near "Wall Settings". Click "Edit".

From the pulldown, select this from the setting, where it says "Default View for Wall", click "Posts by Page and Fans".

Now the fans will show up on your main Wall, with the posts from your business. To change this back, just follow these steps, and click "Only Posts by Page". In this case, "Page" means you.

11 comments:

Thanks IT Girl. This was extremely helpful. I'm trying to build my own personal brand, so I started a fan page in addition to my personal page. Trying to bring my fan page to life is proving difficult, any suggestions?www.facebook.com/dustinsanchez

This post was helpful however, I can not figure out how to get the TABS on my page that people can click on "just fans" or "just page". I see other pages have it but mine doesn't and it's driving me crazy trying to figure it out. Please help!This is the page: http://www.facebook.com/pages/WinCatherine-A-Documentary-on-Catherine-Ndereba-aka-Catherine-the-Great/161510660501?ref=mf

Hey Stefani,In your Edit settings, for your Wall, do you have it enabled to show Fans as well as posts from you the page administrator? If you have it as just posts from the company, then that link should show up. Go to Edit > Wall Settings > and click Only Posts by Page. Then the user has the option to look at Fans or Page. If you let Fans post to your page, then both show up, so no need for the option.